What's Working For Influencer Marketing in 2026, and How Shopify Brands Are Using "The Influencer Pyramid".

Jay Myers (01:09)
Last year, brands lost an estimated $84 billion in ad fraud. And there's a little secret of this is a lot of it is through affiliate marketing. And a massive chunk of this is actually happening inside your affiliate program right now.

coupon sites, hijacking your branded traffic browser extensions like honey, injecting affiliate cookies at checkout for sales you already earned. There was a big lawsuit about that about a year ago. A lot of listeners probably know affiliate bidding on your own brand name and getting paid commissions to send your customers back to you who were looking for you anyway. Lots going on. My guest today is Yash Chavan. He's driven over $59 million in sales.

for brands through his platform, Saral And this week he's launching a new tool, which by the time this episode comes out, it will be live literally in hours. ⁓ So it will have just gone live. So it's live. You can check it out. And it's all built around one kind of brutal question is, is your affiliate revenue actually incremental or are you just paying for sales that you would have gotten anyway?

Yash Chavan (02:05)
Yes.

Jay Myers (02:19)
So we're going to go deep into what's broken with affiliate marketing, how to fix it. I'm really excited for this episode because I work with a lot of brands that are, are doing affiliate marketing. And I know these are very top of mind questions. So let's, let's get into it. Yash, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here real quick before we get into the tactical stuff. Tell me, tell me about your products. what is sorrow and the new one you're launching. Tell me what they're about and then we'll get right into it.

Yash Chavan (02:42)
Yes.

Yeah, so Saral we've been running for about three years now. It's an influencer marketing platform. So if you want to run seeding campaigns, find influencers, manage them.

contracts, get influencers to submit content, pay them, all of that end-to-end influencer management can be done on Saral Part of influencer marketing is also, obviously, you said, incentivizing creators so that in a way that they're affiliates for your brand. And that's a very critical piece. And it's done very badly nowadays, is what we realized over the last year or so. So we started building the new platform called SATHI which we're launching. as of tomorrow,

Jay Myers (03:13)
Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (03:22)
I run two companies. Saral the influencer platform and SATHI the affiliate companion as we call it. So going in your direction Jay, going like the suite of products. Yeah.

Jay Myers (03:31)
I love it. I

love it. Now, is it just, is it, it's one company but two products or is it actually two separate companies?

Yash Chavan (03:38)
Yes.

It is one company, but two products. Yep. But two names, two different brands. Yeah. With their own identities. Yes.

Jay Myers (03:42)
Two products, yeah. But with their own identity. Yes.

Okay, I love it. I'm super excited for

You launched it

three years ago. You've helped brands drive over $50 million in sales and now you're now you're launching SATHI What did you see inside these like all of these affiliate or these these programs that made you say I have to build this?

Yash Chavan (04:04)
Dude, like tracking is just broken. Brands, like you said, brands just don't know if their affiliate program is incremental or not. And on the flip side, they don't know how much of it is fraud. ⁓ So neither are they knowing would these sales have happened anyway. And on the other side, they don't know if the sales.

Jay Myers (04:15)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Yash Chavan (04:25)
that they are seeing as like attributed would have happened anyway. So it's like, it's like the same two sides of the same coin, which we saw with the brands that were running affiliate programs through influencers on Serol. And we were like, this is a problem that needs solving that nobody in this space is addressing because brands have just come. I think as tech people, we have to enable brands or our customers in general to achieve bigger things. Like if Shopify did not exist.

Jay Myers (04:36)
Mm.

Yash Chavan (04:54)
so many brands would not exist today. So I think like it was incumbent on Shopify to create that movement to tell these young entrepreneurs that, hey, you can build a brand out of your bedroom, right? Nobody could have thought of that. So I think like it is incumbent on us tech people to not settle for the status quo. And we decided like we were like...

Jay Myers (05:09)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yash Chavan (05:19)
for the last two years, we were like, yeah, it's like kind of tracking last click, yeah, coupons leak, you you can do this to prevent it. But we were like, you know what, it's not, let's not settle for this. Let's do something better. And let's just give brands a way to truly track incremental affiliate sales and prevent, automatically track and prevent all types of affiliate fraud. That was like the mission of SATHI and how it was conceived. So yeah.

Jay Myers (05:28)
Mm-hmm.

Well, I, a, I think that's incredibly noble because from a product perspective, it could be easy to try to claim as much attribution as you could. You know, I always say like, if you took all of your, your marketing technology that you're using to track, like if you're, you're, if you ran a report in Google ads, Facebook ads, met like Instagram, Facebook, ⁓ email, and then you add up,

Yash Chavan (05:56)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (06:13)
all the sales that used are getting through. Right, and you know, if you're doing a million dollars a month, but according to all your dashboards, it says you're making $4 million a month because they're all kind of claiming the attribution for it. And what you're trying to say is you want to get a true attribution for affiliate and not the what what is an incremental right?

Yash Chavan (06:14)
They're all driving 80 % of your revenue.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Right now, thing with affiliate, like your affiliate platform is literally incentivized to lie to you because why would they catch all sorts of fraud and show you that you're making less affiliate revenue, quite literally significantly less affiliate revenue because we're running some early tests for the AI fraud engine that we're building with SATHI and the percentage fraud is like 20%.

Jay Myers (06:44)
Right.

Yash Chavan (07:03)
like 15 % fraud, which is like insane for programs that are doing 50k, 100k a month in affiliate sales. Like if 20k of that is fraud, it's like you're reducing your ROI, like the ROI that you show on your dashboard as a tech platform significantly. So we're like, but that's just lying. And I don't think that's helping anyone eventually. think long-term, while it is short-term, a good strategy, I guess, for these platforms to just lie to you.

Jay Myers (07:13)
Yeah.

Yash Chavan (07:31)
I think long-term, if there's enough fraud, you're just eventually going to figure it out and stop doing affiliate marketing. Right? So both the brand loses and you lose as a tech platform. So I think it's just better both as a strategy and morally to just show you what it is so you can make the right decisions to scale the reality. yeah.

Jay Myers (07:51)
When you say fraud, I just want to get this, so 20 % of affiliate revenue is not legitimate in some way.

Yash Chavan (08:01)
is some of our early tests with some large programs have revealed like 10% staggering amounts. Like you would think maybe like, okay, 2% is fraud. Generally it's more, like it tends, especially with like the engine that we run. Cause here's how, I'll tell you how, we're actually intentionally catching more fraud and like showing less revenue. So one of the ways that fraud works is self-referrals. So affiliate orders their own product, gets the commission.

Jay Myers (08:24)
Mm.

Yash Chavan (08:28)
and gets the discount and gets the product, right? So it's like, that's fraud. Typically how like modern day platforms catch that is if the email of the affiliate is the same as the email of the customer, you would catch that as a self-referral. But then affiliates are like, nobody's dumb enough to do that. Like if you're an affiliate who's a scammer, like you're going to use another email to order the product and you effectively are still running a fraud. So like our engine would actually like track on an IP level.

and on an address level, who is like, even if they use another email or if they use a variation of the email, right? If they use like jaymyers@gmail.com is the affiliate, but then J.M. is like the customer. it has like these models, these like AI data science models that draw correlation reports and give a likelihood of this being a self-referral or not based on all these parameters. So when you run it through like a traditional

Jay Myers (08:58)
Hmm.

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yash Chavan (09:24)
fraud tracking engine, maybe it's like two to 5 % fraud. But when you run it through like our advanced systems across different types of signals, by the way, you end up finding out, which is what we're seeing is like 10 to 15 to sometimes like in odd cases, even higher percentage of fraud in larger programs. So yeah.

Jay Myers (09:42)
Maybe I had this marked down to get into a little bit later, but now I feel like is a good time. Can you, can you give a masterclass in all the different types of fraud? Like I mentioned a couple in the, in the, the intro, I know there's like coupon hijacking. There was a big lawsuit with honey last year for those listening. honey. Are you familiar with that one? I'm assuming, ⁓ maybe you can touch on that, but what are all there's the, the, the Google ads like

Yash Chavan (09:53)
Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (10:10)
what are the different types when you say affiliate fraud? ⁓ Can you list the main ones and just give me, give a quick masterclass in affiliate fraud.

Yash Chavan (10:14)
Yeah.

Yes.

Affiliate fraud. All right. All the frauds tune in. Here's how you scam companies. no. Yes. So for brands, here's all the way affiliates may be scamming you. One very obvious coupon code leaks. So coupon codes leaked on Reddit, leaked on Honey, leaked on a bunch of these like coupon websites. Obviously people Google the coupon code at checkout. Somebody finds out like, OK, John 25 is available.

Jay Myers (10:24)
There you go. Not for that, to prevent it.

Yash Chavan (10:48)
I'm going to use John to buy, even though they don't even know who the John is, like who the John, the influencer or affiliate is. Right. So that's like one very obvious fraud. Second is fraud by like platforms like honey.com and like these extensions that inject code at the checkout screen. So they're one of the ones. So even if this was what the lawsuit was about in short is even if somebody's coming through an affiliate link and clicking on an affiliate link and checking out honey, if installed,

Jay Myers (10:55)
Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (11:14)
will inject their own coupon code and steal the credit because again, affiliate works on last click or last touch attribution, which means the discount code then eventually gets the attribution, right? So like the code injections, that's another type of fraud. Self-referrals, that's a big one. Like affiliates ordering their own products, which is what we discussed. What else? ⁓ Paid ads, so cannibalizing your paid ads. An affiliate will run ads on, let's say Google,

on your own keyword. So they would bid against you in the same auction that you're bidding in and then get all the clicks and get the commission. So not only are your Google ads then hurt, you're also paying for commissions on the clicks, which they maybe get for cheaper than you. Right. So like there is that. So there's paid ad scannibalization. There is click farm scams. you would there are a bunch of affiliate programs that pay per click.

So you would now just give it to a click farm and then just send traffic or you would do weird, like we've seen very weird things, like somebody literally posted a job on one of these like freelance portals saying, Hey, if you want to apply part of the, it's like, Hey, this is for an e-commerce assistant position, whatever part of the job is placing an order here using this link. And then like everyone's placing order cause it's maybe like a cheap product.

And then you're getting all these like sales or orders or traffic coming from maybe like a country on the other side of the world. Right. So that's another type of fraud where maybe you can detect which is something that we do is like suspicious geo traffic. Like if all of my customers are primarily in North America, but if I get like suddenly start getting traffic from Eastern Europe or Asia or somewhere like that's suspicious. Versus if you just look at clicks.

Jay Myers (12:40)
Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (13:03)
It seems like, well, I'm getting clicks, somebody's promoting us, that's great. But if you look at the source of the traffic, it tells a different story. So a bunch of things like there's refund fraud. So it's like, I'm going to place an order as an affiliate, and then I'm going to refund the product. So I get the commission, and then I refund, so I get the refund also. There's like, yeah, these are some of the top flavors that we've got and we've built an engine to address. So yeah.

Jay Myers (13:29)
There's ⁓ I mean, if you're an affiliate with Shopify, you have to sign a lot of terms that say that you won't do this. You won't run ads or certain keywords you can't bid on and you can get banned. You lose your affiliate account if you are running Google ads with the search term Shopify and making an affiliate link. But I, I sometimes wonder what if a brand I can definitely see where that could cause harm, but

Yash Chavan (13:37)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (13:56)
Do you think some brands could say, well, I don't care if they're running Google ads, let them. if I'm paying a 10 % affiliate fee and someone is running an ad to drive traffic to my site, and if they're willing to pay for that traffic, do I?

Like, there like, is that so bad?

Yash Chavan (14:21)
It's so bad when you are also running ads to drive traffic to your site. Yes, of your advertising. ⁓ not only are you, yes, correct. So not only are you losing clicks on your Google ads, but also paying for commissions on orders that you could have maybe got for much cheaper if they just clicked on your ad as opposed to the affiliate's ad.

Jay Myers (14:26)
that's driving up the cost of my.

Yeah, and that's why Shopify doesn't want people.

Yash Chavan (14:48)
for instance, because the affiliate hypothetically, if you're not doing discounts and you're giving a discount for that affiliate audience, they can run an ad saying, buy now 20% off, but you can't. So whose ad is going to get the click? There's, right? like, yeah, but then, hey, there's nuances. If you as a brand are not running Google ads and you don't care about like branded search, for instance, and you're okay with your branded search, even organic branded search, going on an affiliate,

Jay Myers (15:00)
Right, yep.

Yash Chavan (15:16)
link and then because if somebody searching for the brand they're pretty high intent like they're probably gonna land on your website and maybe make a purchase but if you're okay with cannibalizing that like then that's like that's maybe like a little bit of a gray area but if you're running Google Ads which most brands at any like decent scale would especially on the brand keywords then this cannibalization and paid ads becomes becomes a problem

Jay Myers (15:38)
Yeah. I'll tell you a quick story. Something happened. My brother runs a Shopify store and I'm we're in Canada. Most of our listeners know that and he he has affiliates and he had this one affiliate that like most of it's a most of his affiliates. He was paying like a few thousand dollars a month in commissions and this one affiliate was like always between 50 to a hundred thousand dollars a month like like significant like very high.

Yash Chavan (15:41)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (16:06)
And, and, know, he kind of always like he would, he would, I, we talk a lot about the store he runs and he'd like, he's like, Jay, he's like, is this real? I'm like, well, the only way that they can get that is if they click the link. He's like, yeah, but it just doesn't feel right. Like I don't. So we emailed the affiliate person and saying like, Hey, you're really driving a lot of traffic. Would love to learn more about how you're doing this.

Yash Chavan (16:07)
GORLICK

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (16:29)
Can you like, are you, are you, you YouTube videos? Are you running blogs? Are you doing product reviews? Like no reply, no response, nothing. And then we emailed again, no reply, nothing. And then we finally said, okay, listen, we are going to cause his affiliate commission was 20% and we're going to reduce your affiliate commission to, I think it was 5% unless we hear back from you something. And then

Yash Chavan (16:29)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Myers (16:57)
They finally replied with basically

one sentence. We are running Google ads. That was all they said. And, ⁓ his products are, like they're archery targets, which is a very niche product. It's not like selling consumer electronics and they're a couple hundred dollars per target. They're quite expensive. And so what they, you know, this, person just found that if they run,

Yash Chavan (17:04)
Of course.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (17:23)
Google ads because they're an expensive product and he had a 20% commission. There was enough margin in there to, to sit on a beach and run ads and make money for it. And so, that we never could find it because he's in Canada and he was only running the ads in the U so they wouldn't show. And so we would never see them and they would never show. And the ads would, would, would only show in the U.S.

Yash Chavan (17:25)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, he can make profit. Yeah, correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

oooo

Jay Myers (17:49)
So when we found that

out, we ended up saying to the person, okay, well, we had a conversation. We said, do we cancel this guy's affiliate account or do we just drastically reduce the commission? And so we reduced his commission to 5 % instead of 20. And the thought process was if they can still run ads and make money at that, them, let them, let them do it.

Yash Chavan (17:58)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

on 5%. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Myers (18:16)
everyone else who's doing

legitimate like YouTube videos and Instagram posts and like the real influencer content you want. ⁓ they're making 20. So we cut this person's down to five. They they're still running them. So they're finding a way to, ⁓ to do it. So yeah, I, I, ⁓ it definitely like it was driving up his AdWords, like his cost for bidding on his own brand name was going higher and higher and higher. And

Yash Chavan (18:21)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

ooooh okay yeah damn

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (18:46)
it's driving it up. but you're saying like, I think the biggest challenge he had was he had no awareness of this. And with with SATHI is that now? Yes.

Yash Chavan (18:53)
Yeah. You had to guess an email and like hope

that if he never responded, you may have like never caught it or you've been even a few more months until you figure out that they're running ads. So yes, like with SATHI, it would just auto detect. If somebody sends even a click from a Google ad, it'll flag that.

Jay Myers (19:08)
Nice.

Yeah.

Oh, awesome. Awesome. So when you talk to a brand for the first time, what's  the single fastest tell that their affiliate program is broken? If you look at it before you even get into the numbers and you look at stuff like what's a way that when you look at it, that you can tell that they might have problems.

Yash Chavan (19:14)
Yeah.

Yes.

If they have a low number of affiliates, I'm talking like a dozen or two, and they're driving a lot in sales, there's probably at least some fraudulent activity happening. Again, there's no way to really look at it before you look into data, but if it's very lopsided, where the average affiliate is driving, say, I don't know, $500 a month in sales,

Jay Myers (19:47)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (20:05)
And then your top affiliate is driving some absurd amount like 50k a month in sales. this like extreme lopsidedness. That's again like potentially that person's a fraud. Right. Unless obviously like unless they're like a big influencer and you somehow convince them to be an affiliate for you. Assuming like an equal strata of affiliate. ⁓ Yeah. Yeah. You would know who they are. Yeah. Sometimes brands are very surprised just like

Jay Myers (20:10)
Yep. Yep.

You would know that person though. You would know that name. he would.

Yash Chavan (20:32)
We recording this Monday on Friday. We logged into a brand's dashboard to do this. We were just early doing some early onboardings for SATHI and it flagged that this one person has driven some 40k in sales over the last quarter versus the average affiliate has maybe driven like a thousand. There's like a 40 times discrepancy in the average versus this one person. And then we looked into and it's like a mom influencer with 4.5k.

Jay Myers (20:50)
Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (21:00)
followers on Instagram. So like there's nothing that they're going to do that's going to drive so much in sales unless they go viral, which they haven't even gone viral. So then we like, then we ran the code leaks check and then turns out the code Josie20 leaked on a bunch of websites and Reddit and so on. And then we had to, we had to delete it from Shopify and everything. So yeah, and then it just, it's just running for the last three months until he ran like the fraud, fraud scan. So yeah.

Jay Myers (21:05)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

So what do you do to prevent that?

Yash Chavan (21:30)
What do do to prevent that is diff... Yeah.

Jay Myers (21:32)
So is

the only way that an influencer can share a referral discount with a coupon code? Can you do it just through a link or is there like, are there any ways if it leaks, leaks or is there anything you can do to prevent it?

Yash Chavan (21:45)
You can do it.

There are two things. So there is prevention and then very, very early detection. So prevention is, yes, we have this thing called leak proof codes. So what this is, is there is no actual code that is given to the affiliate. It's just a link. When you click on the link, it generates a one time use code when the person's on the website. If they check out, that one time use code is auto applied at checkout so they don't have to like...

Jay Myers (22:07)
Mm, smart.

Yash Chavan (22:13)
remember the code or anything, as soon as they use it, they check out the code is discarded, it's gone. So one time use code, easy peasy. The downside to this, it sounds good, right? But the downside is if you're working with influencer affiliates, it's largely a lot of, you can't say, hey, use my code, yash25. You have to be like, click on this link, right? Which is hard on socials. You want something shareable and influencers like having a code. If you do have a code, in most cases, like,

Jay Myers (22:25)
You can't say it in a video or something or.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yash Chavan (22:40)
It doesn't even have to be fraudulent for it to leak. Some, like an actual fraud can see the influencer's content and then leak it. So the influencer doesn't even have to be the bad actor here. Right. So there's that. So all you can do as a brand is have a system in place that can detect it and then handle it easily. So we have a bunch of automations that you can set like, if you detect a leaked code instantly deleted from Shopify.

Jay Myers (22:50)
Totally. Yeah.

Yash Chavan (23:07)
and inform the field, like send them an email automatically saying, hey, your code's been deleted, we detected it was leaked, here's your new code. And then like, there you go. So there's a bunch of these things you can do. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're doing a bunch of like early stage, still early stages, because we're just launching. But in the next three months, like there is gonna be a lot of agentic workflows around this, because a lot of this work is just like.

Jay Myers (23:14)
⁓ And that's automated. that's so good. That's so good. So it.

Yash Chavan (23:34)
I mean, we are using AI in the fraud engine. Like it uses a lot of models to like detect fraud and like anticipate like the percentages that I said, like, this person has $400. That person has $40,000. Like that's like an LLM doing that thinking we're going to do a lot of agentic flows. So like, hey, delete this, inform them, or recommend that you should probably move to leak proof codes if you're seeing a lot of fraud, things like that.

Jay Myers (24:00)
Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (24:01)
So yeah, it's all automated and then very soon going to be agentic also.

Jay Myers (24:06)
I was buying something the other day and you know, usually you go to a site and there's always a pop up to get 10% off if you enter your email or something. Um, and this particular site, like the purchase was, it was fairly expensive and I never got a, pop up, but when I landed on the site, I just quickly added it to cart cause I knew what I wanted added to cart went to checkout and then I was checking out and I was like, Oh, Hmm. A 10% off coupon saves me like a hundred bucks here. I'll, I, but I never got one. I never saw. So then I was like,

Yash Chavan (24:32)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Myers (24:35)
I wonder if I just missed it because I quickly added it to cart. So I went into ChatGPT and I just said, are there any known coupons for this site? And ChatGPT did its thing, scanned a bunch of stuff and it it, know, when it when it's doing its work, it says what it's doing and it says looking through looking through common influencers on social media, scanning, doing these things. And then it came back with a result and it said, I found a

Yash Chavan (24:39)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

Jay Myers (25:04)
common code from a popular influencer with this is the code. And so it might not have even been leaked even. It might have just been that they had it on a blog or somewhere and ChatGPT scraped it. So that's a whole nother thing that wasn't even an issue a couple of years ago.

Yash Chavan (25:07)
Yes. Yes.

Correct. Win on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes. So one of the things that we do flag, but don't highlight us fraud and leave it up to the brand is if somebody's link is not being used, but just a code is being used. So in your case, if more people did that, the brand would, because you can't have an affiliate without a link. So they're going to share their link somewhere. The link is going to have some activity. So what our engine does is if it did the, Correct.

Jay Myers (25:46)
So the ratio of clicks on links to coupon codes, there's

probably a healthy ratio.

Yash Chavan (25:51)
Correct. And it learns this by, cause it's by affiliate. It's, there's no like, like, there's like actual number, like, okay, it has to be like 10 times or whatever. It's by affiliate. Some people share their links. So we have like an average over time. And if there's any anomaly, like, okay, now chat has detected this or Claude has detected this starting suggested, started to suggest it to people in a month, you're going to see like a discrepancy and then we'll flag that. So yeah. Yeah.

Jay Myers (25:53)
Interesting.

So smart.

Yeah.

So smart. And you

can probably notice over time too, that like certain influencers have, you know, maybe 70% of their sales are coming through links because they're whatever type of content they're creating is very link heavy. And then you might have other influencers who are just making YouTube videos and whatever, and their traffic is very coupon heavy. And if those get out of an acceptable range, that would actually be fairly easy to detect with AI and just, and flag it.

Yash Chavan (26:25)
Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Correct.

Jay Myers (26:45)
That's smart, super smart fix.

Yash Chavan (26:45)
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Handled. Yeah, like I said, we've spent quite a lot of time thinking about this because we really wanted to give something that's super robust, ⁓ both on the fraud side and we can talk about the attribution side also. It's like, actually give, like what we've spoken about so far is like, don't give credit to the people who don't deserve credit, like fraudulent, code leaks, suspicious order traffic, blah, paid ads.

Jay Myers (26:48)
⁓

Yeah.

Yash Chavan (27:11)
But also, the flip side to this is, which I also want brands to take away, is often they're actually not giving credit intentionally to the people who are driving the actual sale. So for instance, there was this brand that started working with us at Saral and then started working with the Google Ads Agency because they were just ramping up their acquisition. We have PMF, we've raised money, let's go. We started getting influencers posting about them and they were getting like,

30, 40 people posting in like month four, 30, 40 people on average per week posting about them. Insane levels of awareness in their market, right? On the other end, the Google ads, but they're not getting any affiliate sales here, or very minimal. But the Google ads, that agency is crushing it according to the founder, because the cost per clicks are lower than ever, like the acquisition, like, hack is just next to nothing, like.

Jay Myers (27:55)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (28:07)
She's like, okay, I want to stop doing this influencer stuff. I'll just focus on the Google ads. And then you know what happened. Like in three months, the ads just shot up because there was not enough awareness that was driving all the sales. Yeah, the cost shot up because there was nobody was Googling it as much because when 30 people post about you on a weekly basis, all people see you and then they Google you on the weekend when they want to buy the product and they click on the Google ad and they buy. So Google takes the last click attribution.

Jay Myers (28:10)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Like the cost shot up.

Yeah.

Yash Chavan (28:35)
but the influencers who did all of this work go unnoticed. And then you think your affiliate program's not working. So not only is there fraud in this, like this over-crediting fraudulent affiliates, there's also under-crediting the people who are actually doing the work. So it's like a double whammy. So we're also addressing some of this. So yeah, it's a very interesting space and time to be in.

Jay Myers (28:51)
Totally.

Yeah, this was actually my exact next question was this like last click being a faulty metric, but it feels like every affiliate platform on Shopify uses last click attribution. So is the, is the platform, is the affiliate platform broken or is like the metric broken? Do we need to be tracking something different? And like, how can merchants think about that when they're like, I agree with what you're saying that

Yash Chavan (29:11)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (29:27)
You're

right, because this is why celebrity brands have the lowest cost on Google ads, because a celebrity is like, you know, if a celebrity launches a product and you search for a product and you see, a celebrity's name, like, you know, there's trust already built and affiliates when, when, when you go on Instagram and you see everyone talking about a product and now you search for it and you see a Google ad for it, it's going to be, you're going to have a higher click through rate.

Yash Chavan (29:56)
Yeah, exactly.

Jay Myers (29:56)
And so, but how

can you connect that as a merchant to know that it's because of that?

Yash Chavan (30:01)
Correct. Good question. So I'll answer the last click question. it like platforms, merchants? I think it's one of those things that I said earlier, which frustrates me about a lot of technology, especially in our space. It's like nobody challenges like fundamental assumptions. Like why is affiliate last click? Affiliate as last click only originated because affiliates traditionally used to be bloggers, publishers, the coupon sites, these sorts of people.

Jay Myers (30:07)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yep.

Yash Chavan (30:30)
Right. So it's like,

if I have an email list and I'm sending an affiliate offer to my email list of 50,000 people, then yeah, like it better be last click because that's the dynamic. I want the person who's promoting me to get like the last last person who promoted me to get all the credit. And the affiliates were also far and few in between. Now, 20 years later, the world has changed. Brands on average have hundreds of influencers as affiliates. Right. Dozens are posting.

every single day, every single week. In that case, last click breaks because they're not far and few in between. They are many and all of them are posting at the same time. So how do you attribute when five influencers post about you, somebody sees all five pieces of content, which means everyone had something to do with the sale, with influencing the person to buy. But then it's a weekend. I remember my favorite influencer's code and then I just use that at checkout and buy.

Last click attribution, aka your current affiliate platform, will tell you that, this last person that you saw whose code is used, they are like 100% credit for the sale. But it's not true. Like the other four get zero. Like their commission dashboard says zero. So they stop posting eventually, and then your affiliate program dies, right? So you're not giving them credit despite them doing the work. ⁓ So how do you solve for this? So we've come up with two things. Cookie-less and multitouch.

Jay Myers (31:33)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (31:52)
attribution. Another assumption is affiliate tracking only works on cookies. But as we all know, cookies don't work on Safari. Cookies don't work on Brave. People have ad blockers enabled even on Chrome. So cookies don't work there. If you generally have ad blockers enabled anywhere, cookies are blocked. Google Chrome might sunset cookies anytime, right? Marketing news 101. Yeah. Yeah. So like cookies are just a bad way to track.

Jay Myers (32:13)
Well, and anything iOS 14 and later too.

Yash Chavan (32:20)
yet everyone's using cookies to track. So it's like, even for the last click affiliate, half of their stuff is not tracked, because it's it's cookies, and it's like half the browsers don't have cookies anymore. So ours is cookie-less, which means it's fair even for the last clickers. Like, hey, if you drive, if you're a genuine person, you drive a last click, you're going to get attribution for that. On the second hand, to counter for the case that I mentioned, it is multi-touch, meaning if somebody has clicked on multiple affiliate links,

Jay Myers (32:21)
Yep. Yep.

Hmm. Hmm.

Yash Chavan (32:50)
Brands will see that. So hey, if today I see you post about something and I click on your link and I maybe just browse the website tomorrow, Eric posts about something and then I maybe add to cart, but I don't buy. And then on a Sunday, I use the code JORDAN25 at checkout and I finally check out. I have went through three touches, you, Eric and Jordan. And then the brand in this case has the ability to do a last click if they want to stick to that.

Jay Myers (32:52)
Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (33:18)
or to do a first click if they're like, let's say they're a new brand and they want to incentivize people to introduce someone to the brand and not the people who close. You could do a first click attribution. You could do linear attribution, which is equal 30 % credit to everyone. You can do that. You could do decaying attribution. So last person gets like 70 % and then like say 20 % and 10 % or the opposite decay, like first person get 70 % and so on.

Jay Myers (33:25)
Yeah.

Yash Chavan (33:47)
So you can choose from what model you want based on what your product is and what sort of marketing philosophy you ascribe to. So we're giving them the flexibility. And then now in an old world, only Jordan would be getting the credit for the sale. In the new world, you and Eric and Jordan will get some credit for the sale depending on what the brand decides. And now you're happy that you at least introduce somebody. Maybe you get 25 % commission.

Jay Myers (33:56)
That's awesome.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yash Chavan (34:16)
which is still 25 % of the total commission, which is still better than getting zero. So yeah, so that's another, nobody talks about this, but it's like we're living in a new world, it's cookie-less, it's multi-touch, the journey is no longer a funnel, let's drop all of the old methods of tracking and move to this new world. So yeah, those are some of the things we're working on.

Jay Myers (34:21)
Mm-hmm.

I love that. That is so smart. Is it the first affiliate tool to do that? Yeah, I haven't either. And it makes so much sense because A, it will keep your more and more affiliates engaged. Right. And so if you want is like as an affiliate, if I'm an affiliate for a brand, I only can promote so many products.

Yash Chavan (34:45)
For sure. Yeah, I haven't heard of it. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah.

Jay Myers (35:09)
Like I can't promote five different types of daily green supplements. have to pick one. Otherwise, otherwise I come across as like not authentic, right? And I might, I have to be true to my fans. And so if I am seeing no traction from this one brand, I might dump that brand and start promoting another one. And so I think brands are probably losing affiliates like enough and affiliates have a choice who they promote.

Yash Chavan (35:15)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

Jay Myers (35:36)
Like they don't have to promote you. can, I mean,

Yash Chavan (35:36)
yes.

Jay Myers (35:39)
they can look like, you give 20%, you give 10 % and they can pick by that way, but they can also pick by which one am I actually going to make sales on? And if you tell me with your platform, I make sales or I make revenue through a multi-touch ⁓ system, that might be the tipping point for me. Like I, know, and it also makes your affiliates, I kind of feel like a team, like they're not

Yash Chavan (35:47)
Yes.

Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (36:04)
just

competing against each other. Like that's, I love that.

Yash Chavan (36:07)
Yeah, yeah,

correct. Because like, it's also like the type of affiliate that would work for a last click sale is actually not the type of affiliate that would introduce somebody to your brand, right? Like, there's content creators on say Instagram or TikTok that do content like, here's my Amazon haul or here's my Walmart haul for the weekend. That's such bottom of funnel content. That's like buy now content, right? Or if somebody is doing like my daily routine,

Jay Myers (36:28)
Yep. Yep.

Yash Chavan (36:35)
That's not, and there's a Greens powder in there. That's like sort of top to middle of funnel education content. Like that's not going to get as many clicks, but that drives a lot of influence and that needs to and deserves to be credited. So we saw that with Saral because we were like, we saw all these influencer programs and all these influencers promote, but brands relied on last click and coupon codes. So only part of them ever got the credit. And typically these tended to be these sorts of last click people who

Jay Myers (36:46)
Yes.

Yash Chavan (37:03)
make this type of content. Everyone's necessary in the funnel. I'm not saying one is good or bad, because you do need top of funnel, mid funnel, and bottom funnel content. But if you never incentivize the mid and top of funnel, you're never going to have those people. And if you don't have those people, the bottom funnel people are not going to be able to sell anything because there's no education and nurturing happening. So you need to incentivize everyone, and that's what we want to enable.

Jay Myers (37:28)
Do you have any data yet or is it too early, but on which model works best? the linear, the decreasing, the, like, is there any one that you recommend?

Yash Chavan (37:38)
I wouldn't, one, we don't have the data yet, super new, like testing this with brands. Two, on just like a theory perspective, I won't even call one model better than the other. It really depends on where you are, what type of stage of awareness your product is in. Like I said, if you're a brand new product that needs a lot of education and like, for instance, we work with this company that's like a

Jay Myers (37:57)
Yeah, that's a good point.

Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (38:05)
It's called brick. It's literally like a brick that would break your phone when you're working. So no notifications. Yeah. Yeah. So like such a new category, like you can't you got like I just had to explain that to you. Right. Yeah. So like they might want to do like incentivize the first touch more. So for them, like an exponential decay model is better because like the first few people who tell somebody about you are way more important than like the last few. Or is this your supplement brand?

Jay Myers (38:10)
yeah, I'm aware of the, yeah, I know them, yeah.

Yeah, you have to educate people on it.

Yash Chavan (38:32)
you're competing against hundreds of supplements and you just want somebody to close that sale for you, then maybe a last click model or a reverse decay model would be beneficial. Or maybe you're somewhere in middle and then you want to do a linear, it's like, hey, just be fair to everyone. So it's almost like a internal philosophy that you have and then obviously a little bit of awareness of who you are as a company, which should determine your model. And the good thing is we have

Jay Myers (38:37)
Yeah.

Yash Chavan (38:59)
Like the way the system is built is you can choose a model to attribute, but you will still see how the program looks under other models. ⁓ So you can still see how the attribution shifts if you were to ever switch to like the linear model, for instance, is your affiliate revenue more or less that way. So you can always run these like tests parallely with like obviously simulated data. So you pick a model to incentivize and then you still have the other models running in the background.

Jay Myers (39:09)
Mmm.

Interesting.

Yash Chavan (39:29)
if you ever want to see like a data visualization of how it looks like under different models. So yeah. Yeah.

Jay Myers (39:34)
Yeah, yeah. So cool. I didn't ask,

how with with Seral is being an influencer management platform. Now, does the SATHI work with it? so prior prior to this, anyone using Seral to manage influencers was was just using any tool for affiliate payments.

Yash Chavan (39:42)
Yep.

Yes.

Correct.

Correct.

Jay Myers (39:58)
but now that

can be integrated and I can kind of have this in one view.

Yash Chavan (40:02)
Correct, correct, absolutely. So previously before SATHI, yeah, good question. So previously, so these products kind of like play into each other. Previously, brands had to use another affiliate platform to run their affiliate side of things. Red and Saral integrated with some of them, so which means you could still see the data on Saral, but it was still hosted on another platform. With SATHI, it is just now built into Saral, so it'll integrate.

Jay Myers (40:05)
Tell me about that, like how, yeah.

Yash Chavan (40:27)
Everything can be done on Saral. The same things you can do on SATHI can be done on Saral. Because we own the technology for both platforms. So it's much more seamless for brands running influencer affiliate programs also, and like the whole seeding, gifting, like that sort of spiel. And also simpler now for brands who are just doing affiliate, for instance. And often brands maybe like want to use the discovery, the seeding. Once they build a community of like 300, 500 people,

Some brands are happy with that. Like they don't want a large affiliate program. So then the other parts of Saral, such as the discovery, the CRM, the management may not be as useful as just the tracking management, creator retention, fraud prevention functionality. So then that is the part that SATHI does really well.

Jay Myers (41:02)
Mm.

Where do you see the biggest challenge brands facing when it comes to affiliate marketing? it finding affiliates, working with them, being competitive with other brands, like convincing them to come on or like if someone, I guarantee there's a lot of listeners probably based on the surveys I've done, I bet you over 60 or 70 % of our listeners listening to this episode are not working with affiliates. ⁓

Yash Chavan (41:30)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (41:41)
And I, you probably know the exact data on what it is, but I'm just going from our user base, but, ⁓ they are, they're not sure where to start. They know they probably need to do some product seating, like sending their products out. They don't know how to manage it. It feels overwhelming. Like, where do you see the breakdown of, should every brand be using, like working with affiliates or where, where's that, that point where like a brand has struggles the most.

Yash Chavan (41:46)
Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's a it's not about every brand. think it's about at what stage do you want to start leveraging influence in your marketing? And I say influence and not influencer very particularly if you're in your like the first growth stage of your brand, like going from zero to one zero to three million, like figuring out PMF, figuring out your first marketing channel, which is typically some form of paid media, mostly meta ads.

Jay Myers (42:19)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (42:36)
right for Ecom. Just do that. Like don't distract yourself with influencers or maybe like have a passive. One of the things you could do in Sathi is like turn your customers into affiliates so you can set up rules like hey, if anybody buys over $500 auto turn them into an affiliate. Like you could have something passive like that if you need to and just have something running but that shouldn't have to be a focus, right?

Jay Myers (42:55)
Okay.

Yash Chavan (42:59)
Once you get to the first milestone where your ads now start plateauing, because you've run out of everybody who's in market and at any given time, like one to 3 % of the market is in market, like looking to buy. And ads are great at targeting though that sliver of the market. But what about the other 97 % that's not in market that you want to influence to be in market so the ads can target them. Then you work with your influencers, then you start seeding, then you grow awareness. And once the awareness is high enough,

Jay Myers (43:06)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Yash Chavan (43:28)
and those people then Google you and click on the Google ad and buy. Those are those brands. So I think once you're at that stage when you want your, what we've seen with Saral so far, is influencers, affiliates, there are exceptions, but influencers affiliates tend to be a really good second growth lever that take them from three to 10 or one to five, as opposed to zero to one, zero to three, if that makes sense. So if you're in these stages where you're looking for your second growth lever, then,

Jay Myers (43:33)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yash Chavan (43:55)
work with influencers affiliates is my recommendation. Yeah.

Jay Myers (43:57)
And Seral

will help identify influencers and engage with them and sign them up.

Yash Chavan (44:02)
Yes.

Correct. So searching, so discovery. Hey, show me fitness influencers in Austin, Texas who are men between ages 20 to 50. Like, Saral does that. Contact all these 500 people with my offer. Saral does that automatically. Has a CRM to manage everyone. So like, hey, where are they in my process? Have they signed? Have they posted? Are they an affiliate? Are they a paid influencer?

like all of that management CRM are done by Saral. ⁓ So all of that is in Saral. Yes, or email. Yeah, yeah. yeah, email's big, by the way. Email is like the very under-leveraged, that's our, so we built a search engine. So we integrate, yeah, so we integrate directly with like the platform APIs. And if their email is publicly available anywhere on the platform.

Jay Myers (44:35)
Hmm. And so it messages them through like through Instagram or through Tik Tok or through the platforms. All right. OK.

So how do you get the emails of the account? That's the secret sauce.

okay.

Yash Chavan (44:59)
we have access to it, which most influencers who want to work with brands have their emails available.

Jay Myers (44:59)
Gotcha.

If they, yes, if they're, yeah. But

what about finding, people who are not maybe like an influencer, but they are like, they're putting out good content and they've got a good following and maybe you kind of discover them. ⁓ like, is that something that like sorrow would help with? And is that like a good way to approach it? So like, rather than just going to like the people who are clearly an influencer.

Yash Chavan (45:17)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (45:28)
But like if you're posting about exercise cause you're on a diet and you're posting your personal journey, you've never been paid by anyone, but you're just doing your journey and you have 7,000 followers, nothing crazy, but a decent amount. And I might want to reach out to you to say like, Hey, yeah, like, do you want to post about our stuff? I'd love to send you our supplements or whatever.

Yash Chavan (45:28)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's actually like built for that particular use case more than finding the large ones because the large ones you're going to find in like top 100 influencers in X list like on Google. They're easy to find. What's really hard to find is like the gems where you want to find like, hey, show me the soccer mom who talks about productivity. Right. Like, where's that person? You know, ⁓

Jay Myers (46:00)
They're easy to find. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yash Chavan (46:13)
That's like, so Saral does that. And you can like do a multi-keyword search. You can search for, if you really have an example. So here's like a hack for everyone listening, right? Find like a big influencer in your space that you cannot afford. Let's say like, let's use like Hexglad as an example, right? Like, hey, Hexglad has Gordon Ramsay, right? If you're a cooking brand or like, you know, you're in that space, you're not probably gonna afford Gordon Ramsay. But what you can do is go to Saral.

Jay Myers (46:39)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (46:42)
plugin at Gordon Ramsay and we'll find you influencers who are similar to him in lower follower ranges. So basically if Gordon Ramsay has whatever, five million probably has more, but let's just say five million followers. Those people, those five million people individually also like maybe 50,000 of those people follow this like other girl who's also like a chef, right? So you can hit

Jay Myers (47:06)
Mmm. ⁓

Yash Chavan (47:10)
Ramsey's audience by working with somebody with 50k followers. they can detect that and show you these hidden gems. Like, Hey, this person has like 40,000 people who also follow Ramsey and they have 50k total followers. like 90 % of their audience or 80 % of their audience is basically like Ramsey followers. So you can work with Ramsey without working with Ramsey if you get like 10 of these affiliates. like there's different hacks like these that you can do and find these.

Jay Myers (47:32)
Totally. Yeah.

Yash Chavan (47:36)
hidden gems basically like you said of people that you wouldn't turn on classic like influencer influencers. Yeah

Jay Myers (47:43)
That's so smart. Yeah, rather than just paying the big, the top dog, get the smaller ones, but they have the same audience. you're, yeah, yeah.

Yash Chavan (47:48)
Yeah, yeah, with the same audience. yeah, yeah.

Because like the people who follow like Kim Kardashian also follow like the makeup influencer with 10,000 followers. Why everybody wants Kim Kardashian and ignores the 10k follower person. So just go work with like 100 of those. They're probably cheaper, easier to work with. I will stick with you for longer and so on. Yeah.

Jay Myers (47:58)
Exactly.

And I sometimes think they might even convert better because like when I see

celebrities posting stuff, I kind of know it's a, it's a paid post, you know, like it. And if I see someone who's not quite as big, but there's someone I respect and someone I follow and there may be something like, I won't always assume they're getting paid for it. And so I might think it's just more authentic and genuine. So it might even convert better.

Yash Chavan (48:16)
Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

Correct. Correct. It's trust. Any sale, as we know, like if we've been in sales for long enough, it's like any sale is a transfer of trust. That's what it is. I don't trust like a bit the rock with a supplement like, you know, but I trust like, you know, that that dude with 15K followers who's gone from like fat to fit. I'm like, guy, man, like he's like, I trust him. I don't trust the rock. So like

Jay Myers (48:36)
Yeah.

Yep. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yash Chavan (49:00)
You know, it's just trust. And it's like, who has a higher degree of trust with their audience? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yep. Correct. Yeah.

Jay Myers (49:02)
You trust people that feel like you, that look like you, that you identify with, that are in your social class, and then you want to hear what they have to say.

Okay, can you walk me through, imagine you run a brand, let's say it's some kind of supplement, let's just say anything, but you're doing, you found product market fit, you're doing maybe a couple million a year, nothing huge, but it's like, okay, you've established, you're not currently doing anything with influencers, you're not currently doing any affiliate marketing, and now you sit down, you're listening to this episode and you're like, okay, I gotta.

Yash Chavan (49:19)
Yes.

Okay.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I have BMS.

Jay Myers (49:41)
I gotta, I gotta get on the affiliates and I gotta get on my thing. How are you implementing this? Like tell me exactly step by step, the structure that you would do to build out your influencer and affiliate program. And you're, you're, know, given that you're at the right stage.

Yash Chavan (49:42)
Yeah.

Perfect. You need to build your influencer Illuminati. Okay. So what I mean by that is, you know, there's this conspiracy of how Illuminati is like the secret society that's controlling and influencing the world. Maybe that's true. Maybe that's not. That's a separate podcast Jay. But you can build your influencer Illuminati, which means a small group of people, 100 to 200 that are influencing

your customers or your future customers to buy from you. That should be your North Star. How do you build your Illuminati? What's the symbol of an Illuminati? It's the pyramid, right? It's this. So now you've got to think about it like a pyramid. In three layers. Base, you start seeding. Like you said, everybody wants to seed. Easiest way to start. Hey, dear influencer, I'm this new brand. I'm up and coming. Here are my USPs.

Jay Myers (50:28)
Mmm.

Yash Chavan (50:52)
I'd love to send you a free supplement for like a month's worth of supplements. If you try it, if you like it, if you see results, please post about it. If not, that's okay. know, very easy offer for an influencer to say yes to because they don't lose anything. If they don't like it, they don't post. If they like it, they post. And then there's like a future, maybe like a deal or a partnership here. Start seeding. Some of those people are going to post. Posting is positive behavior for you as a brand.

incentivize more positive behavior by turning the people who post for free into affiliates. Don't start by like turning everyone into an affiliate. Now you just have like a bunch of random affiliates. Let's see first, see who posts, see who likes your product enough to post about it for free, then make them an affiliate. Now they're an affiliate. Now you keep running your affiliate. Now we're in the second layer of the pyramid. Now you're running your affiliate program for three months, six months. You're going to see that

Jay Myers (51:29)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (51:49)
pretty much always at 80-20, where 20 % of your affiliates are going to drive 80 % of the sales, 80 % of the views. Take that top 10, top 20 % every month and turn them into long-term partners. Retainer deals, equity deals, higher percentage affiliate commission, white listed ads or partnership ads, Spark ads, anything. Do custom deals with them. That's the tip of your pyramid. So, North Star?

Jay Myers (51:57)
Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (52:16)
I'm a supplement brand. I need to build an influencer Illuminati to go to the next level. I start with seeding. I send hundreds of product every month. Some people post. I turn them into affiliates. They start performing. Once I have enough performance data, only then I'm gonna start paying them and make sure that the performance data is correct by the right attribution methods with the right fraud handling. So you start in the second layer and then you graduate them into like a.

paid tier or a custom tier where they get a higher affiliate commission or some sort of a custom deal. And that's how I would approach it is this sort of three layer Illuminati pyramid framework. So yeah.

Jay Myers (52:56)
This is awesome. mean, this is like, could clip this right here and send this to listeners, but this is awesome breakdown. I feel, tell me if I'm wrong, but my guess is most brands like that top of the pyramid one where you take your, your best ones and you break them out into some type of a separate program is probably what most brands don't do. And they're missing out on a huge opportunity of like 10 Xing down on the, really good ones.

Yash Chavan (53:01)
Yeah.

Yeah.

⁓

Most brands don't even do the middle. They just want to seed. So they're like, yeah, we're just going to start seeding and then get some content and that's it. But there is no retention built into that model because they post about you once, maybe twice, and then they're gone. you never hear from them again. Right. So like so many brands focus on this recruitment treadmill of just like getting more and more influencers to post about them. But don't think about like metrics like

Jay Myers (53:34)
Yeah.

Yash Chavan (53:45)
posts per creator, we call it PPC internally, right? Like, what's your PPC? If your PPC is one or two, you're in trouble. Make sure you incentivize them to keep posting again and again, because eventually you're going to run out of a top of funnel. There's only so many creators that your audience trusts, right? It seems like there's unlimited, but it's very easy over a year to reach out to 50,000, 100,000 people. You'll run out of people.

So you better build a program where like people are incentivized to post to that again and again. like, yeah, to answer your question, most people don't like just to the bottom. Do the middle, like build an affiliate program. And yes, like the people who build an affiliate program, oh man, please turn your high, why is everyone on a 15 % commission? Don't give them more, give them 30%, gamify your program against something you can do in SATHI, like set up a reward. Hey, once you cross $10,000 in sales, you get a 3K bonus.

Jay Myers (54:17)
Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (54:40)
a great thing to do, incentivizes them like anything. Or once you cross 20k in sales, you get an email saying, hey, let's do a paid deal where we'll pay you 20k over the next six months if you guarantee that you are going to post about us a certain number of times. Because you now have data to say that, this person posted about us 15 times and made 20k in sales. Just pay him 20k for the next three months and get a guarantee of 15 posts. It's like...

Jay Myers (54:40)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (55:08)
pretty much guaranteed sales because you have that equation. What people do is worse, they flip the pyramid. So they start paying influencers upfront. And then they're like, well, influencer marketing doesn't work. Because there's no proof that there was any resonance that they even liked your product or their audience liked your product, or they could even sell. So first get the validation that they like your product to the base of the pyramid. Does their audience like your product and can they sell to the middle of the pyramid? That's the affiliate. And at the top is your creme de la creme.

Highest performing creators. So yeah.

Jay Myers (55:40)
And then are you always recommending to then ask influencers or these creators to white label their content as like paid promotions that you put ad spend behind?

Yash Chavan (55:53)
Yeah, pretty much that's been working really well for brands now. Because again, trust is with the creators. It's no longer with institutions or brands. So obviously, the ads that you run through a creator's account, partnership ads, white listed ads, whatever you want to call them, tend to perform better than typical ads. But we've seen some evidence to the contrary. It really depends on the brand and really depends on the influencer. So make sure you're testing this with creators.

Jay Myers (56:03)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yash Chavan (56:20)
For well-known people, this works better. So like, this is something to do with like larger creators who get recognized. Like you said, like if it's a celebrity and you see like a celebrity's name on the ad, you're more likely to click. But if you like, don't know who this person is, then it's just more like a UGC ad, which is still maybe better than like a brand focused ad, but may not be as better as most people see on like LinkedIn and Twitter. Yeah.

Jay Myers (56:32)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Well,

I always wonder, like, I know they work. I know brands are crushing it with those white, with white labeling ads, but I wonder sometimes if you want to balance, because when, when you see paid promotion on an ad and if it's like, if it's someone I follow and I've been seeing them post about it and then I see the paid promotion, I, I, there's a little bit of less trust, but like, I think it's still there. Like I, I,

Yash Chavan (56:47)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (57:10)
To me, it doesn't affect it that much, but I wonder if like a balance is healthy. So it's not just every post you see, you see the little paid promotion up in the corner.

Yash Chavan (57:13)
Yeah.

is like, ⁓ yeah,

yeah, totally. I think like that's like up to the affiliates, right? But then if they do that, their natural ability to drive sales for brands is going to go down because you're then essentially selling out your audience by partnering with whoever or just keeping on promoting things. And most influencers like who are smart and who want to treat it as it's because it's it's a media business. You know this, you run a podcast like

Jay Myers (57:26)
Yeah.

Yash Chavan (57:46)
You don't want to promote everyone than anyone, right? Because there's a trust. There's always that little bit jab, jab, jab, right hook, right? So if you just keep right hooking, then your audience is going to leave you. So yeah.

Jay Myers (57:53)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah. Where does AI play in this? know you're big. You built it's called SIA right? Your AI product within sorrow. ⁓ So I know you're a big proponent of AI and very forward thinking on it. Is there any big shifts you see with influencer and affiliate that AI can help with?

Yash Chavan (58:05)
Haha, yeah. Yes.

I think there is a lot of operational work that affiliate managers do right now that quite literally like in the next three months, 80 % of that we will just eliminate like from basic things like, yeah, like even things like collecting W9 information from affiliates for taxes or making invoices or following up with your inactive affiliates or pulling up reports about or looking at

Jay Myers (58:31)
Hmm. All the middle work.

Right.

Yash Chavan (58:48)
dashboards and like filtering and figuring out who's not performing, who's performing, who do I need to reach out to to make sure that they drive sales next month? All of that stuff can be AI. I think like a lot of reporting, AI can drive insights. Like AI can look at data at a depth and scale that no human will ever look at. Right? So like it can look at things like that and surface insights that humans cannot. So stuff like

Jay Myers (58:57)
Hmm.

Yash Chavan (59:13)
Very, very basic example of that is things like the coupon code used, like the hey, the coupon, like the code usage is much higher than the traffic usage. Like if you just look at data, data, like you can't see that as a human, but like LLM can spot that very easily. Like think that, but like much higher order. I think there's so much just grunt that AI can automate. I think that's like level one. And we'll be there at Saati in like three, four months.

Jay Myers (59:28)
Yeah.

Yash Chavan (59:39)
Level two is like, which is what I'm the most excited about, is what can it do that humans cannot do? Is it able to like figure out like this weird like, hey, if you just change your attribution model from this to this, your affiliate program is going to drive 20 % higher sales. like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like if you just increase your commission model from 15 % to 17%, these affiliates who haven't posted for a while, I predict with 90 % confidence that they're going to start posting.

Jay Myers (59:59)
Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (1:00:07)
which means the X percent revenue increase in the next three months. Like that's like my pipe dream. So I want to, I want to build that. I'm very excited for that person. We're running some internal POCs. So I don't want to speak, speak too soon or very like confidently about this, but I feel very pumped about some of the stuff we're doing around the things that humans, a lot of AI companies, a lot of AI tools are like trying to replace humans. Okay. Fair enough. think like level one thinking, think level one, level two, level three thinking is like

Jay Myers (1:00:14)
Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (1:00:35)
What can it do that the human physically cannot do due to human constraints? So like, that's like, that's where that's what excites me the most.

Jay Myers (1:00:43)
Amazing. I have a few lightning round questions, but before I get into those, is there any question you wished I asked you today?

Yash Chavan (1:00:44)
Yeah.

go for it. Yeah.

man, would just based on our pre interview, I would just love to talk to you about like operating companies and business in general. Like I think, I feel like I have a lot of questions to ask you. You've run like a 400 people company at some point. Like there's a lot that I need to learn and I'm like, yeah. but yeah, no, no, I think, I think we're good. I think we covered a lot of ground. ⁓ yeah.

Jay Myers (1:01:11)
You've, you've,

yeah, you, you've built an amazing company. I know, um, for those listening, you know, sorrow was launched in 2022 and before the show, I was just telling Yash how much I admired what he's built because at bold, um, at, you know, transparently in 2022, we were going through layoffs because that was a really hard year for almost every tech company. remember Shopify laid off 20%.

of their team. It was like every single company you in 22. It was like the pandemic. There was this peak of everyone thought, oh, the whole world is only going to be online commerce and it's all going online and tons of money was thrown at any company that was doing online commerce. And then in 2022, the world started opening up again. And all that money was like, Oh, Nope. Okay. Everything went back. No more money. And you launched right in the hardest time. And sometimes they say that the best companies are started

Yash Chavan (1:01:52)
You

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers (1:02:11)
at the hardest time, like, you know, like Google started in 2001 at the dot boom collapse and Facebook 2008 and the housing market collapse. And like, so do you think there's some truth to that? Like you started at a time where you had to build something that worked. You couldn't just fund it.

Yash Chavan (1:02:11)
in it yeah in a bear market yeah yeah truly yeah yeah

I think, yeah,

yeah, I think, and we're bootstrapped ⁓ so far, plan to be that way. So I think it builds a certain level of discipline and it's like, what's it called? Like hard seas make strong sailors, right? It's just that. I when the sea is rough is when you become a very good sailor. I think if it's like peace and quiet, then there is no, when it's wartime.

Jay Myers (1:02:32)
Amazing.

Mm-hmm.

Yash Chavan (1:02:51)
then it's then like who's the general then who's in the battlefield then I think that that makes really good people in general so yeah I think 100 % I think there's some truth to that

Jay Myers (1:02:52)
Yes.

Yeah.

Okay, I want to end with a couple quick lightning round questions and just for those listening, I didn't send these to Yash ahead of time, so he has no clue. So I'm going to throw these out real quick, one answer. Last click attribution tool, what's one tool that has outlived its usefulness?

Yash Chavan (1:03:03)
Yeah, go for it.

Yes. Yes.

man, impact.com.

Jay Myers (1:03:21)
Okay. Okay. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I, I, I actually, well that like, I use that with a cause like Shopify uses it and I find it archaic. Like it is, it is archaic. I agree a hundred percent, but they must have really good salespeople that get in with these enterprise brands. Cause I agree. I agree with that. what is the most overrated affiliate tactic in 2026?

Yash Chavan (1:03:29)
Yeah, it's just bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

most overrated affiliate is no strings attached. Oh, man. Like, it's not a, it's like the seeding tactic, but it's like to get them to be an affiliate. It's like, Hey, I just want to reach out to you and send you a product. No strings attached. Like just writing that is just icky to me. Cause it's like, are strings attached, bro. Like there are, you're gonna, when you send them a product, you know, just say it, just say it like, Hey, if you like it, you post about it. If not, it's fine. In that sense, there's no strings attached. But when you say that there's no strings attached and then you like,

Jay Myers (1:04:00)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, be open.

Yash Chavan (1:04:13)
follow up with like hey do you want to post about it it's like maybe not so yeah I think that's like overrated I think it's it's done for so yeah

Jay Myers (1:04:20)
What's the most underrated affiliate tactic in 2026?

Yash Chavan (1:04:25)
Ooh, turning your affiliates into long-term partners. Nobody thinks of the top of the pyramid. They all want to like be affiliates and play that game, but you want to eventually build predictability into your engine and the way affiliates are going to leave, there's going to be natural churn. The way you make them stick is you make like sign contracts, make them long-term partners. I think like stop making them affiliates, like do something else. Yeah.

Jay Myers (1:04:29)
Mmm.

What's one number every Shopify merchant should be tracking on their affiliate program, but they aren't.

Yash Chavan (1:04:56)
good one. A bunch of metrics we have, but RPA, revenue per affiliate. Nobody looks at this pretty much. Quality of the program. You may be driving a hundred K in sales, but maybe it's only coming and you have a thousand people affiliate group, but only like 150 of them are actually like driving any traffic. So why are the other like 850 there? Burjum, you're just unnecessary ops headache. So I think looking at revenue per

Jay Myers (1:05:03)
Mmm.

Yash Chavan (1:05:22)
revenue per affiliate is a good one. So earnings per click is another one, EPC, nobody looks at that. ⁓ Earnings per click shows you the quality of the traffic that you're getting. ⁓ So yeah, so I think, yeah, you asked for one, I give two, it's fine. Over delivering, Jay. Yes. ⁓

Jay Myers (1:05:28)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, yeah.

Okay, last question. I heard a monkey got into your house last week.

Tell me, well, how the heck does a monkey get into your house?

Yash Chavan (1:05:50)
dude, I live in an apartment complex and then they're like repainting the building. they're they have this like scaffolding around. some like a group of monkeys came from somewhere scaffolding, easy to climb compared to like a trip. They just climbed in. They found my kitchen window. They hopped in. There were quite literally bananas because I use bananas as pre workout. They ate my bananas.

Jay Myers (1:06:07)
my goodness.

Yash Chavan (1:06:13)
So, no, I couldn't. Like they were just there. Thankfully, we found them and then we just closed the door to the kitchen. So they were just trapped in the kitchen. And the only way they could get out is they ate everything and they left. So yeah, they quite literally ate every single fruit that was there. They opened every single utensil. It was quite a scene. yeah, it was fun.

Jay Myers (1:06:14)
How did you get them out? Did you shoot them out the window or?

they eventually just left.

my gosh.

Yash Chavan (1:06:41)
It's a fun story to tell on a podcast. So yeah. Yeah.

Jay Myers (1:06:43)
Yeah, yeah. I thought a fun spot to fun spot to end. I

I actually had a pet monkey as a kid. You would not. I grew up in Africa and in Sudan and I had a pet monkey and it was the worst pet ever because you couldn't catch it. It was like like a dog. If it's bad or something, you could be like sit or like you could train it. A monkey you couldn't catch. It would jump around and it would get a cup on the lights like it was just the worst idea for a pet. But we had a pet monkey. His name was Coco.

Yash Chavan (1:06:58)
I can't wait. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Myers (1:07:13)
And anyways, so I have a related story. ⁓ yes, thank you so much for coming on. This was a ton of fun. Where, can people go? to, to, try, like, I guarantee there's people listening right now that want to take advantage of both of these tools. Where can you send them anything else you want to say to, to point them in that direction and, then this off.

Yash Chavan (1:07:13)
Oh man, Coco is such a good monkey name. Yeah. I like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, if you're looking to start an affiliate program, there's no better time. By the way, Instagram also recently enabled link clicks on Reels. So I think affiliate is just going to blow up because of that new mechanism. So you want to take advantage of that. Mysathi, S-A-T-H-I dot I-O is the right place to go. There is a trial, get a trial, see if you like it. If you want to be prioritized, we're getting the trial a little bit because we're early. If you want to be prioritized for the trial.

Jay Myers (1:07:47)
Yes.

Yash Chavan (1:08:05)
just use code JAY, when you fill the form and we'll bump you up the list. yeah.

Jay Myers (1:08:11)
Awesome. And I will make sure to put all these links in the show notes and the email that goes out and everything as well too. So this has been a ton of fun. I learned a lot. Thank you, Yash for coming on and I wish you all the best with your launch, which when people are listening to this was probably five or six days ago. But I hope it goes well and we'll definitely, we'll definitely be in touch. Thank you so much.

Yash Chavan (1:08:16)
Yes.

You

Yeah. Yes.

Thank you, Jay. Appreciate you having me on. Bye bye.